Central Trust

Sep 1, 2008

Here I descibe in detail my approach to taking a working control landing page and turning it into something all together more effective. My landing page optimization process, fully at work. The current “control” page The current landing page has evolved through vigorous AB split testing on PPC. We utilize our highest volume term for this testing, the “Loans” exact match keyword. We have very similar variations of this page for other terms – with the only difference being the header “Search 100s of loans, unrivalled access to 100s of loans, exclusively for homeowners”.

Mar 19, 2008

This design hopes to split the sales messages off onto a front page and then concentrate more on support and reassurance messages on subsequent pages. This design went live in Feb 2008 and so far has had mixed results. Click through rates once customers arrive on the app form are very good but the extra drop-off because of the “pre” page seems to be limiting it to similar performance to the current control design.

Mar 6, 2008

We could see that a huge amount of SEO traffic was navigating to the calculator even though the links to the calculator were not emphasised. We added the calculator to try and engage that traffic in order to improve CTE. By giving customers access to the functionality that they want we hoped to keep them on the site longer and expose them to more marketing. Even more traffic reached the calculator but CTE was unaffected.

Feb 4, 2008

This application was the technically most advanced that I built for Central Trust and involved AJAX validation and postcode lookups as well as front-end only Javascript for tooltips and highlight the section you are in.

Oct 1, 2007

In Sept 2007 I designed a new landing page and added a number of enhancements to the application form. Primarily these were client-side enhancements based on usability. The design was never fully utilized but the application form enhancements were retrofitted to the current site. This new design was an attempt to add clearer messaging and more elements to reinforce the users trust in the site/company. This included a single core message at the top (mirroring the PPC copy in use), three simple bullet points on the left, addition of “lender logo’s” and the added prominence of the “security & Privacy” comment.

Sep 10, 2007

Until this release very little effort had been made to increase the sites visibility in natural search engines. This version of the site was used on all none landing pages and was more text based, it went live Sept 2007. http://www.debtbusterloans.com The homepage is optimised for the UK Loans keyword (loans by itself being extremely competitive) and the design is text-heavy and quite simple to allow spiders to crawl the site as easily as possible.

Mar 12, 2007

The Central Capital Mortgages site has been running for a number of years with limited profitability. My redesign has made huge improvements and at present other marketing campaigns have been suspended to concentrate on PPC as it has become the most profitable channel for the business. The site went live Jan 2007. This new design went live 26th Jan 2006 and had an immediate impact, with the conversion rate moving from 3.3% to 7.7% on the remortgage PPC keyword on google.

Dec 2, 2006

I designed the loans4tenants site and created the logo, although there was a colour scheme change before we went live. I build the site myself, including the application form, which includes optional sections and pages – up to a maximum of 10 pages. The application form includes some javascript to hide and show sections and sends it’s data through to a SQL Server database. The site was received very well by the business and enquiries were raised by approximately 50% (no data was collected on the previous site!).

Nov 30, 2006

This is the Central Capital loans and mortgages site, mainly used for marketing to customers. It links through to the centralcapitalloans.com and centralcapitalmortgages.com sites. It went live Nov 2006. The homepage is packed with marketing messages with the main emphasis on users selecting either a loan or a mortgage when we direct them to the correct site. The sitemap lists the limited number of pages on this site but also directs users to the other sites that target particular products.

Jun 22, 2006

Platinum Loans was a new brand created in order to offer an individually chosen loan plan with a low rate so that we could advertise a low APR. Compliance required that we check the users eligibility for this plan and we had to provide duplicate versions of the site for other APR’s. The design was provided by our creative team and I built the site, application form and the management of different APR versions of the site.